Everything I Never Dreamed: My Life Surviving and Standing Up to Domestic Violence

By Ruth M. Glenn

The raw, uplifting, and unforgettable memoir from the CEO and president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence chronicling her personal battle against abuse, violence, and even a murder attempt.

Ruth M. Glenn wasn’t surprised the first time her husband beat her. She was hurt and disappointed but after a childhood in a broken and violent home, she was not surprised. After all, this was just the way things were, right?

It was only after she lay bleeding in a carwash parking lot, after being shot three times by him, that Glenn resolved—if she managed to survive—to spend the rest of her life standing up to domestic violence.

Now, she brings her full story to the forefront with this survivor’s tale crossed with a rousing call to action. She reveals her difficult but ultimately rewarding journey from that parking lot to sacrificing everything to obtain her advanced degrees. With her evocative and thoughtful voice, Glenn explores the dynamics of domestic violence, why women and children are seen as lesser in our society, how to stop victim-blaming, and how to demystify domestic violence to stop it once and for all.

A memoir of resilience and courage, Everything I Never Dreamed is a necessary book that proves that abuse does not have to define a survivor’s entire life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982196028

Ruth M. Glenn

Ruth M. Glenn is currently the President of Public Affairs at the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Previously, Glenn served in the Colorado Department of Human Services for twenty-eight years, the last nine as the director of the Domestic Violence Program. She has served on many domestic violence program and funding boards, given hundreds of presentations on domestic violence victimization and survival, testified before the Colorado State Legislature and the United States Congress, and provided consultation, training, and technical assistance at the local and national levels on domestic violence victim/survivor issues. Glenn has advocated—professionally and personally—for many policies, including reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act and legislation involving the intersection of firearms and domestic violence. She lives in Denver, Colorado. You can follow her on Twitter @RuthMGlenn.

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Prologue

In 1992, when I was thirty-two years old and living in an apartment in Denver with my fifteen-year-old son, David, my husband kidnapped me at gunpoint. I had left Cedric a few months before, after years of physical violence and emotional abuse, and taken David with me. We had moved into the apartment on a Friday in late September. By the following Monday, Cedric had found us. A female friend of his had gotten my new address by going into my bank and pretending to be me—ID checks were a little more lax then than they are now. She’d also wiped my account clean. That morning, I had been talking on the phone with a woman from Project Safeguard, an organization that supports victims of domestic violence, through safety planning and legal advocacy, when someone started pushing the buzzer at the main door of my apartment building. I could hear it ringing through our intercom. I tried to focus on what the woman was saying. I wanted to find out about their legal clinic, I wanted information about getting a divorce. But the longer the woman and I spoke, the more she realized I was very likely in danger from Cedric. She suggested that I immediately seek an emergency protection order to keep him away from us. And then, as if on cue, I heard Cedric’s voice coming through the little speaker in the hallway. David had pressed the button just to ask who it was. He knew better than to buzz his father in.

The woman from Project Safeguard called the police and said David and I should get on the floor. She kept me on the phone as Cedric demanded to be let in. By the time the police arrived, Cedric was gone, or had hidden. They escorted David and me out, and we stayed at a shelter for two nights. Shelters are invaluable to women being abused, and I’ll be forever grateful for them. Everyone working there was kind and supportive. But shelters aren’t the cure-all people often think they are. I felt very on edge there. I knew that going to a shelter was another layer of trauma for David, after we’d just fled the home we shared with his father. I managed to get a temporary protection order against Cedric. But it soon became clear that wasn’t a cure-all either. It would protect me from nothing.

I had laid the groundwork for leaving Cedric very carefully. In a domestic abuse situation, you don’t discuss it with your abuser. Saying you’re leaving, or being caught trying to, can get you killed. Domestic violence is all about control; signaling you are about to assume some autonomy is very often the trigger for an escalation of violence and more desperate attempts by the abuser at controlling you.

Cedric was very explicit about the danger I was in. He used to say to me, If you leave, even if you’re in Alaska, I will find you. Sometimes he just said, I’ll kill you if you leave.

You feel damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Sometimes, as strange as it sounds, the safer option for the moment is to stay.

But once I’d made the decision, I worked stealthily. I had been putting aside money for months, and had opened my own checking account. I’d hunted for an apartment in secret, and paid the deposit on it. The phone and utilities were hooked up and waiting for us. Cedric didn’t know about any of it, but there was a slight change in the air. He could sense that my attitude was different. He suspected something was up, and he got a little calmer, though it wasn’t a pleasant sort of calm: I could feel him observing me.

It wasn’t just Cedric I kept it from. I’d told almost no one I was leaving him. I was afraid if Cedric found out someone had supported my decision, their lives would be in danger, too. I didn’t even tell David we were leaving until he got home from school that day. The two of us packed up the U-Haul I’d rented and drove to the new apartment. (To protect my friends who knew, I wouldn’t accept their offers of help moving.) And then I went back to the house for Cedric’s 9 p.m. call. Whenever he was working double shifts at the Colorado Division of Youth Services (where I also worked), he’d call me on his break to make sure I was home. I knew that if I didn’t pick up the phone that night, he’d immediately get suspicious. So I bought myself some extra time by racing back for the call.

And then I went to my new apartment, to begin the rest of my life.

I was on my own now, but I was far from free. Stalking and harassment are an abuser’s way of demanding that you think about them, that you live in fear of them; it’s a theft not only of your freedom of movement but also of your inner world. Over the next few months, Cedric continued to stalk and harass me. He would show up when he was drunk, or high, or agitated. He used to park in the outdoor lot or sit in the grassy yard that faced our apartment, from where he could see our balcony. He called me one day from his house and said, You think I’m not watching you? Look out your window. There was actually a worn patch in the grass where he sat—or even slept, when he was passed out drunk.

And then came the day in 1992, when I pulled into the parking garage attached to our building. There was Cedric, standing in my assigned spot. He had a bottle of liquor in one hand; the other hand was in his pocket. As many times as I’d seen him angry, this was worse. He looked possessed. I thought, I don’t even know this person.

He came around to the passenger side of the car and climbed in. Drive, he said.

I said, What’s this all about, Cedric?

Just drive to my house.

Where’s David? I asked.

Listen, bitch. David’s just fine.

I tried to get him to talk to me about what was going on, but then he pulled a gun out of his pocket, and said again, Drive.

Okay, okay, I said, just don’t hurt me.

I backed out of my spot and headed slowly toward the garage exit. There was a maintenance man at the garage door, fiddling with his toolbox but with an eye on Cedric and me. I clearly remember thinking he suspected something was wrong and was trying to figure out what was happening. I looked at him and tried to communicate that I was scared and needed help, that I was being taken against my will, but either I was being too subtle because I was terrified, or the man was too afraid to intervene.

Cedric told me to drive to his house, about six miles away, in Aurora. As we turned onto East Hampden Avenue, just a few minutes from my apartment, I was trying to figure out if I could jump out of the car. One of the things that stopped me was the fear that I could cause an accident that would leave other people injured. So I just kept driving, wondering how I was going to get out of this alive. I don’t recall that we said much on the way, but at some point Cedric told me he’d been upstairs in the apartment with David. By then, our son had seen enough to know that Cedric was likely going to go after me, which was why, as we neared Cedric’s house, I saw a police car flying down the road in the opposite direction, away from us: David had called them right after Cedric left our apartment, and he’d given them Cedric’s home address. When they didn’t find anyone there, they left for my apartment.

Cedric saw the cop car, too, and said, You just keep driving.

Later I would think I should have flashed my headlights at them or honked or swerved off the road. But I was in a car with someone I knew might kill me, and I couldn’t think straight.

Cedric lived in a split-level house in Aurora with his girlfriend. I didn’t see her when we went inside. Cedric grabbed some money and the bullets that were lying on the coffee table.

Holy shit, I thought.

When you’re in a relationship with a violent abuser, you learn how to manage the chaos and violence to minimize the risk of escalation and the danger to yourself and your children. You learn how to appease, how to pretend to be passive. You learn to maneuver in the presence of your abuser because your life depends on it. Just go along with it, I thought. Just keep him calm.

Cedric told me to get back in the car, and to head out 6th Avenue. He didn’t say where we were going. He would only say, Turn left here, or Now turn right. It was clear he had a destination in mind, but was making me take a back way, on side streets, to avoid the cops. It was like being in a maze but knowing that wherever we eventually emerged would only be the beginning of another nightmare. I’m a captive, I thought, and not a single person outside of this car knows where I am or what’s happening to me. Rattling around in my head that whole drive were the words Does anybody see me? How can I get them to see?

PART I

Before

CHAPTER 1

Somebody

The people we come from are never perfect. Many of us spend our lives trying to make peace with their flaws, or trying to shape ourselves in opposition to them.

When I think of my mother now, what comes to mind first is her strength. She possessed incredible fortitude—she wouldn’t have lived through the things she did without it.

Of course, it’s not that simple. I have spent my life with a set of contradictory feelings about my mother, a state of constant tension that has never resolved itself. On the one hand, there is that strength, and the admiration I feel for it. On the other, there was something about mom, the way the world had beaten her down, the way she seemed at times to inhabit the role of victim too readily, that made me determined to become the opposite. It has never been about being better than she was; it’s been about not letting the world wear me down—not society, or the environment I was living in, or people who didn’t want the best for me.

My mother, whose name was Bobbie, grew up in Sacramento. Her parents were white working-class people of German extraction. It was an abusive household. Her mother, Wilma, who had a job in a cannery, was a bear, a domineering woman who abused my mother physically and verbally. My mother told me a story about Wilma throwing a pair of scissors at her one day, which stuck in her leg. My grandfather, Earl, was the opposite, small and docile, an electrician, but also an alcoholic. I gather that he, too, suffered at the hands of Wilma.

Mom was a wild child, always chafing against her mother’s attempts to control her. By the age of fourteen, she was pregnant. It would be the first of nine pregnancies (she would lose two of those children—a son after two days, and a daughter who lived only a few hours). Ric was her first child, born in 1952. She and Don, Ric’s father, married only to give Ric a surname, but they never lived together. The marriage was annulled immediately after Ric’s birth. He didn’t talk to his father until just before Don died in 2008.

For the first couple of years of Ric’s life, he and my mother lived with Wilma and Earl. Although she was always clashing with Wilma, my mother stayed at her parents’ house until she was eighteen; Wilma had threatened to take Ric away if my mother left when she was still a minor. But once she was gone, she was gone; she barely spoke to her mother again. By the time Mom was out on her own, she’d met her second husband, Bill Mead, a ranch hand and rodeo rider, who had wandered into Cooper’s Doughnuts on K Street, where she was working. They married and moved north to Eureka, where Mom got a job as an information operator with the phone company and Bill went to work on a ranch. Mom’s second son, Will, was born soon after, and in 1958, she lost Robert, her third son. So many details of my mother’s complicated history of husbands and children are murky, and I have never known the cause of Robert’s death. But my mother remembered riding in the family car with Ric and her husband Bill, taking Robert’s casket to the cemetery in Arcata, her neighbors having been generous in providing flowers and paying for the small grave marker.

Shortly after Robert’s death, Mom and Bill separated. She was soon on her way to Reno, intent on learning how to deal cards so she could work in the casinos. My father was in the air force, stationed then at the nearby Stead Air Force Base. My mother’s first two husbands had been white, as she was, but my father, David—whom everyone called David E. because his middle name was Edward—was Black. When they began seeing each other in 1959, they were subject to the usual trouble that interracial couples had then. One night out walking they were arrested and put in jail for a few hours. Their crime was vagrancy—a catch-all term police used if they wanted to harass people like my parents, warning them against carrying on together.

My mother got pregnant very quickly after meeting David E. They weren’t together long, and though I would make contact with my father at a couple of points in my life, I never did learn much about him. For several years I actually believed that my stepfather, Alvin, was my biological father; he was Black and his name was on my birth certificate, after all.

My mother had met Alvin through a friend at a New Year’s Eve party in 1959, while she was pregnant with me. Within a year of my birth we had moved to Riverside, California, and I already had a baby brother. My mother would go on to have three more sons with Alvin, as well as a daughter, Juanita, who died soon after birth.

Alvin worked off and on as a trash man and a janitor. Once in a while, he would bring something home from his trash pickups, like a tricycle. We were poor enough that even a toy taken from the trash seemed new and exciting. Mostly we were living on welfare. All of us in that household endured violence at Alvin’s hands. There were times I had to protect my mother and my younger brothers from Alvin’s rage. I recall one awful day when Alvin had my mother in the laundry area and was trying to put her head in the washing machine. When I realized there was nothing I could do to stop him, I got my brothers outside and safely out of Alvin’s reach. (Facebook, in their infinite wisdom, recently suggested I friend Alvin.)

There is a photo I have of my mother with two of my brothers, Ronnie and Brady, and me. There is also a white child with us, a neighbor whose mother must have snapped the photo. I see several stories when I look at this picture. First, I notice that my mother isn’t looking at the camera. She never did until she was much older. She didn’t want to see herself. (I’m not looking at the camera either but in my case it may be because of my bad eyesight. I am squinting, as I always did in the years before I got glasses.) But what comes across most poignantly to me from my mother’s expression, what I can see from her bowed head, is sadness. I see the sheer hopelessness and helplessness of her existence. I also see a white woman with three Black children. That alone—never mind the abuse and the poverty—must have been incredibly isolating and difficult; there just wasn’t a society then that was open to her and her family.

Judging by our ages in the photos, it’s a good bet my mother was pregnant when the picture was taken. I think Alvin kept my mother pregnant deliberately—what is known in the domestic violence world as reproductive coercion, and what in those days might have been called, more crudely, barefoot and pregnant. Gary was the last of my mother’s children, and though I was only eight, I would soon be taking care of him. My mother simply wasn’t able. By then she must have felt her life had spun completely out of control. Five children under the age of nine, very little money, and Alvin’s constant abuse. She was also coping with the loss of Juanita, who was born in August 1963. The days around Juanita’s birth and death would weigh heavily on my mother. Years later, she described to Ric how Alvin went into the funeral home to see Juanita and came out looking like he was in a state of shock. He told my mother that they had Juanita lying on the counter in a paper bag and that she should definitely not go in and look. The guy who owned the place had actually said to Alvin, I don’t know what all the fuss is about, she only lived six hours, it’s not like she was a normal baby. My mother was haunted by images of how such a person would dispose of her daughter’s body.

My mother had medical problems after Juanita’s birth. She was in a weakened state, mentally and physically. Alvin, meanwhile, was up to his usual ripping and running the streets, as she would say—carousing and philandering—and it was all she could do to take care of the three children she had at home. I didn’t follow through about Juanita, she told Ric. And it really bothers me now, as do all my shortcomings when they come back to smack me in the face.

By the time my brother Gary was born, I had learned from a neighbor girl that Alvin wasn’t my biological father. I was so happy I wept. It wasn’t long until I decided that I had to find my father. Part of the impulse was wanting a protector, and imagining that he could be that. My mother was a little reluctant to stir anything up, but she agreed to help me. She understood how important it was to me given the life we had with Alvin, and to her credit she soon began making phone calls. She ended up tracking David E. down through the air base in Reno where he’d been stationed. By then he was living back in South Carolina. I had a vision, like any young kid whose parent has vanished, that that parent was going to swoop in and save me, but my father definitely wasn’t up to the task. We did exchange a few letters—in one he enclosed a Polaroid of himself—but I was the more eager correspondent. He was undereducated, and his letters were more like notes; I can still see the few lines of chicken scratch. And then the contact abruptly ended. We would communicate just once more, in 1992, several years before he died. But by then, my father, and whatever I had dreamed he might be to me, had receded into the background of my life.

---

I have heard people say being a victim of domestic violence is akin to being a prisoner of war. I’ve never been a prisoner of war in the literal sense, but from what I’ve read of that experience, I think it’s an appropriate analogy. (In the 1980s, those working in the field of trauma began to understand that the psychological syndrome seen in survivors of rape, domestic battery, and incest was essentially the same as that seen in combat veterans and survivors of war.) The impediments to your escape might not be in the form of locked doors or chains—though of course there are such instances—but they nonetheless exist, in economic, legal, and social forms, and in the form of sheer terror. When you’re abused within your own home, you are always kept off-kilter; you never know what the day will bring, or what your abuser will do from one minute to the next. You just pray it’s a good day, and you live your life in the grip of fear, enduring abuse that is hidden from the outside world. The way an abuser isolates you, and keeps you guessing, is part of the psychological manipulation, the exercise of control. You’re constantly in reactive mode, trying to predict what will keep you safe today, or at least alive, which might be different from what kept you alive yesterday. And in the process, that person you used to be, the perspectives she had on things, the way she saw herself, slowly erodes.I

It can become hard to remember the time when cruelty and violence were not the norm—to really believe that they aren’t normal. When you think about your escape, you know that if your plan fails, or your will falters, you could wind up in a more terrifying scenario than you’ve ever been in before. You could even wind up dead.

I don’t know what finally drove my mother to leave Alvin. She never discussed it with me, even when I was much older and leaving my own abusive husband. I know only that on the 4th of July, 1970, when I was ten years old, my brothers and I were hanging around the kitchen while my mother cooked fried chicken, and at a certain point, as though in answer to an inner voice, she looked around and said, We’re leaving.

There must have been more to the moment than that (had her sudden decisiveness followed an argument, or some particularly awful abuse?), but the fact that I remember it that way probably says something about how I felt growing up in that household: the sense of unpredictability, how I too often had no idea what was going to happen or why.

My mother loaded up the station wagon and we piled in. It wasn’t an easy getaway. For whatever reason, my mother didn’t wait until Alvin was out, and I recall, as though it were yesterday, the mayhem that accompanied our departure: my stepfather and uncle attempting to drag me out of the car; one of my younger brothers climbing a tree at one point to get away from Alvin. We did manage to get away, and though we were terrified of him hunting us down, I only remember him showing up once at our house.

We landed on the top floor of a duplex at Park Avenue and 11th in the Eastside neighborhood of Riverside, a poor section of town where there was gang activity. Our house, which was rimmed by a chain-link fence, was dilapidated and in need of painting. No one lived on the first floor, and at night, transients and homeless people would sometimes sleep there. By then, I was accustomed to poverty and chaos.

And then I met Mrs. Malcolm. She was my fifth-grade teacher—young, energetic, and fashionable, she carried herself with an air of confidence and was very kind. In her apartment, I would discover my first oasis of calm. A few years earlier, I never would have crossed paths with her. But busing had recently begun in our school district, and so I was bused to Liberty Elementary, a majority-white school about seven miles away, in the Arlington neighborhood, where Mrs. Malcolm taught.

When people think of segregation during that period, they think mostly of the American South, but de facto segregation was the norm in California, and racial tensions were high. (Even as late as the early 1980s, the Riverside–San Bernardino arm of the KKK was the largest of its three branches in California.) In the late summer of 1965, as the Watts riots were unfolding in Los Angeles, parents of minority children in Eastside had begun to organize and speak out about inequities in the segregated local schools—substandard books, dilapidated buildings, understocked cafeterias. They were preparing to address the school board about it, but in September, just before children would return to their classrooms, an elementary school attended almost entirely by minority students was burned to the ground. Lowell School was less than ten blocks from my house. The fire was almost certainly arson, though no one has ever been arrested for setting it.

The fire, coming on the heels of the Watts riots, put people in Riverside on edge. Staff were told to visit the campus only with police escort. But the fire triggered action. Almost immediately, the school board pledged to create an integration plan within a month. By October 1965, Riverside had become the first large school district in the nation to integrate its schools without having been ordered by a court to do so.

So there I was, on the big yellow bus, headed to Mrs. Malcolm’s class. Aside from me, the mixed-race girl, there were only two Black children in the class. Racism insinuated itself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. When one of the girls from the more well-to-do white families got head lice, her mother went to Mrs. Malcolm and said, The Eastside kids are giving our kids lice. The nurse came and checked all of our heads, going through our hair with her fingers. (Even Mrs. Malcolm took off her 1970s-era wig and had her own head checked.) But no one in the class except the nice white girl and her friend had lice. The Eastside kids weren’t the source of the infestation after all.

At that age, I felt plain-looking—or even homely, depending on the day. I was skinny and wore the great big glasses I’d had since I was in kindergarten. But despite episodes like the head-lice accusation, I remember a feeling of safety in elementary school, and Mrs. Malcolm had a lot to do with that. I was the sort of student any teacher would love—I always had my homework done, always raised my hand, was always polite. On the playground, I could hold my own, through a toughness I learned from growing up with brothers, but in class, I was the model student.

Mrs. Malcolm was in her second year of teaching, and she picked up on my love of reading and nurtured it. There were no books in our house, so I read whatever I could find at school—Pippi Longstocking, Onion John, the Nancy Drew series. Mrs. Malcolm took me to buy books of my own, too. She encouraged me to read the Newbery Award winners, given each year to the best children’s books.

Mrs. Malcolm spoke to me in a way no one ever had. She asked me questions and listened carefully to my replies, as though what I said mattered. She was the first person who made me feel I was somebody.

Sometimes, Mrs. Malcolm would pick me up on a Saturday and I’d stay over at her apartment. Her husband was working nights, and I’d eat dinner with the two of them and then he would go off to work. Mrs. Malcolm showed me a world I wouldn’t otherwise have seen. We went to the movies. She took me to my first musical, a children’s show at the Fox Theater in Riverside; we sat in the balcony, and I was mesmerized. She took me out to dinner, too, showed me how to order in a restaurant. We’d go shopping at the mall: pretty socks, colored barrettes, cookies, ice cream. My brothers wanted to know everything I’d gotten to do at Mrs. Malcolm’s. They’d beg to go with us, and Mrs. Malcolm would always say, I’m sorry, it’s just a girls’ outing. Because it wasn’t only about the treats or the exposure to new experiences—things my own family couldn’t afford. It was the quiet of her apartment, the way I had peace there. At home, I had four brothers and my mother’s various boyfriends. I felt lost in the chaos—hardly even seen. At Mrs. Malcolm’s, I could sit and read on the porch, without all the screaming and yelling, without anybody wanting or demanding anything from me. There were always fresh towels by the tub, and I spent hours in the bath, sometimes even reading in there!

Then we’d call it a night and I would sleep on the couch, which Mrs. Malcolm had carefully made up for me—sheets and blankets that I would fold up again just as carefully in the morning.

Something told me that I should never allow my mother to see how happy I was to be going to Mrs. Malcolm’s. Maybe part of that was not wanting to hurt my mother’s feelings, but mostly I was afraid that if I seemed too excited, my mother would put a stop to the visits. She could see that Mrs. Malcolm and I were becoming very close, and instinctively I knew that that was threatening to my mother. She already didn’t like my 3 a.m. reading under the covers—when she caught me awake, she’d wallop me. But Nancy Drew, or whatever else I could get my hands on, took me away from where I was.

Mrs. Malcolm was white, and I’m conscious here of painting a picture of